No longer heavily reliant on traditional TV advertising, McDonalds has tuned into a more holistic digital strategy to capture the attention of the next generation of customers, reported Salesforce senior marketing consultant to McDonald’s, Stuart Coleman, during the Salesforce’s Future of Marketing forum.

“McDonalds has changed the way it’s taking new products and services to market,” he said. “They’re now focusing on a more personalised, below-the-line advertising. The customers have changed, too.”

It’s the destination every brand wants to reach: Personalised customer engagement. And at Flight Centre, the ticket is booked and the trip well underway thanks to investments in customer journey mapping, marketing resources, content delivery and omni-channel retailing.

Strengthening its marketing capabilities to better engage with customers across the entire purchase process is one of seven core pillars of Flight Centre’s strategy as it transforms from a 30-year old travel agent into a world-class retailer of travel.

Woolworths has detailed a three-year strategy which it claims will transform the organisation into a customer-first business and help neutralise its competitors.

“What is clear is that while lower prices are essential, the true battleground is the overall customer experience,” said Woolworths Food Group managing director, Brad Banducci during the supermarket giant’s Q3 financial results. “We are placing the customer at the start of everything we do. This strategy will result in lower prices, more compelling offers and greater innovation.”

Analytics and insight for its own sake is just an academic exercise: “It’s about everything we do driving to an action and outcome,” Telstra head of analytics, Liz, Moore, told CMO in an interview describing how the telco is applying data analytics to its customer engagement efforts.

“When we talk with internal stakeholders and work out how to allocate revenues, it’s about being clear on the pathway to action – what we will do differently as a result of knowing that information? It’s a powerful question for analysts and researchers. We use it as a lens over our program of work so we strip away any ‘nice to knows’ and focus on things that will drive to an outcome organisationally.”

Woolworths is looking to roll out beacons across all of its click-and-collect stores following a successful proof-of-concept trial of the proximity marketing technology with customers.

The supermarket giant offers a click-and-collect service for groceries across 254 stores nationally, allowing customers to place their order online and pick it up in-store. Woolworths Online head of business development, Elise Barber, told CMO one of the biggest challenge it is trying to solve is reducing service times for the customer.

Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) global CMO, Simon Marton, is on a mission: To transform the culture of the wine manufacturing business from a production-led, wine-making mentality, to a brand-led and consumer focused one.

“We’re changing virtually the whole culture and strategic direction of the business to be about building brands, with the wine making and supply supporting and delivering to our customers and consumers,” he said.

LinkedIn has revealed its list of Australia’s top 10 most influential brands based on their content marketing efforts. The list is based on a content marketing score calculated both on measuring a brand’s unique engagement, and dividing it by a brand’s audience.

While Telstra and Commonwealth Bank are on the list, the top of this year’s list is a surprising one.

There’s been plenty of speculation over Australia Post’s future in the face of digital disruption.

Two senior executives are tasked with leading Australia Post into the new age: One-time CIO and now executive GM of trusted services, Andrew Walduck, and CMO and executive GM of consumer and SMB products, Greg Sutherland. Both are positioning digital transformation as an opportunity for customer-led innovation and sustainable change. Both also agree their efforts are transforming the very nature of what it means to be a marketer, and a technologist.

Teradata’s decision to sell-off its marketing applications business and focus purely on data and analytics has divided the media and industry community watching the exponential rise of marketing technology globally.

“Over the past year or so, we’ve been digging more deeply into our internal operations and into the markets we play in,” Teradata CEO, Mike Koehler, told investors during its Q3 results presentation, surprising many. “We have key initiatives underway to improve the performance of our company, both shorter term and longer term. While we have not completed the entire process, we're already starting to take some significant actions.”

We’re entering the third era of digital transformation where a customer’s experience of your products and brand will be delivered via “living services” fuelled by data analytics, the Internet of Things and real-time, contextual engagement.

“We’re now entering an era where organisations can no longer measure the quality of their customer experiences against other organisations in their industry,” said co-founder and CCO of Accenture Interactive’s Fjord business, Mark Curtis. “Brands have to look across a breadth of user experiences and what are the best practices, then try and compete with those.”

According to CMO’s State of the CMO 2017 research, 83 per cent of CMOs believe customer experience to be central to their role. An interesting stat considering few of us experience great brand experiences.

Latest Podcast

In this bonus last episode of this new podcast series, BrandHook MD, Pip Stocks, talks with former ANZ group general manager of marketing, Louise Eyres, talks about the importance of thinking like a customer and using intuition to solve customer painpoints.

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